HP palms off Palm with a weighty new name

HP palms off Palm with a weighty new name
HP's Gram is not to be sniffed at

A leaked memo seems to confirm that HP is set to spin the remnants of Palm into a new company called Gram.

Sources close to the matter have confirmed to All Things Digital that HP has cobbled together the bits it has salvaged from the closure of Palm and is about to announce Gram, a new subsidiary that will house the soon-to-be-released open source version of WebOS.

At first, HP's acquisition of Palm in 2010 looked to be a good one but the company never capitalised on Palm's smartphones and tablets.

The failure of the HP TouchPad was the final straw, essentially shuttering the hardware arm of Palm for good. Then CEO Meg Whitman decided there was life in the WebOS operating system and announced in late 2011 it was to go open source.

Focus on software

According to a memo leak, the focus of Gram will be on software (we're guessing the name it's a truncation of 'program'), with the note explaining: "We are no longer a consumer hardware brand, we are a different company with focus on software, User Experience, Cloud, engineering and partnering.

"This change in identity will take some getting used to and that's normal."

It seems that getting used to a change of identity is normal – especially if you are an employee of HP.

Via AllThingsDigital

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.